The development of communication services has posed increasingly higher requirements for network deployment and design. A network is required not only to forward packets correctly during a communication process, but also to perform multiple types of service processing when forwarding the packets so as to optimize the forwarding performance and availability of the network. Examples of such processing include antivirus processing, firewall processing, is traffic statistics collection and traffic accounting, traffic policing, and traffic regulation.
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram illustrating a network for implementing multiple service processing functions in the prior art. In the existing approach, multiple network devices for providing different service processing functions are connected together to collaboratively implement multiple service processing functions. As shown in FIG. 1, a router device, a firewall device, and an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) device are connected successively to perform routing and forwarding processing, firewall processing, and IPS processing for packets in turn. However, connecting different network devices to implement multiple service processing functions results in large investments and has many disadvantages such as poor interconnectivity between network devices and lack of ease of management and maintenance.